by Vail, Rachel
But he didn’t. Even Lou isn’t that bold. He said, “Um . . .”
“Hay-stacking!” Gideon Weld coughed into his hands.
“I like the Internet,” Lou said, sinking into his chair. He’s the tallest boy in our grade and sort of a doof, but also funny. His mother is running for mayor. “And I like apple picking.”
Ms. Cress raised her eyebrows, twice, and said, “Mmm-hmm.” We all knew what she was thinking about. “Work with me, people,” she said. She wrote the information on the board for us to fill in the blanks of our permission slips.
I love trips, and I’ve been looking forward to this one for six years. It’s tradition at Boggs Middle that the seventh grade starts out the year going apple picking. It’s supposed to promote unity. Last year on the trip, two couples got caught making out behind a haystack. The whole school found out, of course, including Ms. Cress and every other teacher. “Hay-stacking” immediately became our new dirty word. The two couples were practically movie stars for a week. We mostly say making out or scooping, now, but “hay-stacking” still means a romantic, forbidden kind of kissing. Nobody says it out loud—you sort of have to clear your throat with it: “Hay-stacking.”
“Oh, no,” I heard myself groan when Ms. Cress wrote Monday, September 21, on the board.
“Something wrong, CJ?” Ms. Cress asked.
I shook my head, but then asked, “What time will we get back?”
“Six thirty,” Ms. Cress said and wrote at the same time. “Now that’s a week from today, ’K? So we need these permission slips back pronto!”
I rested my face in my hands all through the announcements. Even after the bell rang, while Ms. Cress was yelling, “And, hey, really try to get these permission slips back to me fast—we’ve got a contest going in the teachers’ lunchroom, and I want to win the cookie!” I didn’t look up. She thinks she’s hip, such a kid. Teachers should just realize they are adults.
I finally folded my permission slip, stuck it into my bag, and headed toward Spanish. Zoe, who takes French, was outside Madame F’s door, hanging out chatting with Olivia.
“Is your hip hurting?” Olivia asked me.
“My what?”
“Your hip,” she repeated. “You’re rubbing it.”
“Oh,” I said, realizing I was still searching for a nonexistent pocket. “Um, a little. But, I mean, no.” Olivia’s mother and mine are number one on each other’s speed dial, so everything gets back, fast.
“That’s good,” Olivia said, twirling one of her pigtails.
“Thanks,” I said.
Tommy passed us, going to Spanish. On his way, he said, sort of in my direction, “Hi.”
Zoe and I looked at each other. I could feel myself blushing so I covered my face with my hands.
Olivia asked, “What?”
I expected Zoe to explain, but when I looked up, she was staring at her friendship ring, readjusting it. So I told Olivia, “Tommy asked me out.”
“Oh,” Olivia said. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She’s really sweet in some ways, but she has strong opinions. I think I let her down sometimes. “When?” she asked.
“Friday,” I said.
“Congratulations.” She opened her folder holder and flipped through.
“Thanks,” I said again. We’re more cousins than friends, Olivia and I. In fact, I call her mom Aunt Betsy. She’s one of the few not-totally-white kids around, because her father is half-black and her mother is half-Filipino. Over the summer some kids at the Swim Club whispered, “Kung Fu,” right in front of us at the snack bar. Olivia said, “So what, they’re showing their ignorance,” but I wanted to punch their ignorant teeth in. Mom said I had good instincts; she didn’t blame me. When I was in The Nutcracker last year, Olivia gave me a good-luck flip book she made herself of a ballerina doing a leap and then a pirouette, which was amazing and obviously took her forever to make no matter how talented she is. But even though we really do care about each other, we’re very different—she still wants to invent board games together and send them to be patented. I’m ready to talk about boys. She’s much more of a brain so I feel stupid, sometimes, like when I bring home a test with an 87 and my dad says that’s great, what did Olivia get, 101? It’s a joke, but still, sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to act toward her.
She slid her permission slip into one of her folders and asked me, “So you can’t go on the trip, huh?”
“What?” Zoe asked. “Why?”
Morgan was just passing us, going to Spanish, but she said, “Dance.”
“Hey, wait up,” I called to her. We usually walk together.
Zoe and Olivia followed us. “What is she talking about?” Zoe asked me.
“I can’t go apple picking,” I said.
“Why not?” Zoe asked. Her voice is so loud.
“We don’t get back until six thirty,” Olivia told her.
“Yeah? So?”
“So,” said Morgan, stopping outside Spanish. I almost bumped into her. “CJ has dance at four on Mondays. Not that she even likes ballet anymore, but . . .”
Olivia looked at me. “You don’t?”
“It’s complicated,” I answered. I dropped my book bag and checked my French twist. It was holding, of course—my mom is so good at hair she does everybody’s for performances.
“You like it or you don’t,” Morgan said, blowing her bangs out of her eyes. “How complicated is that?”
“You can’t miss one day?” Zoe asked me quietly.
I shook my head. “Something could happen, some casting director could come to watch. You can’t. And especially, my mother?”
Morgan blew her long, dark bangs out of her eyes again and explained, “CJ’s mother says it’s important to devote yourself to something so you’ll stand out from the crowd.” She used a high voice like my mother’s. Morgan is a good actress so it really did sound like Mom.
“Really?” Zoe asked me. “She says that?”
“All the time,” Morgan answered. “Makes me feel great.”
“She doesn’t mean anything against you,” I told her. Morgan thinks my mother looks down on her. She doesn’t, not really. “She just, it’s true that . . .”
“My mother says it’s important to clean your nails,” Zoe said.
We all laughed. Zoe is good at breaking the tension. She has four older sisters, so she gets practice.
“That’s why CJ is a superstar, and I have three nail clippers,” Zoe added.
I shook my head. “Don’t say that.” The last thing I need is my new best friend calling me a star, too, thinking I’m a show-off. I just want to be normal, one of the crowd, like her.
“What?” Zoe asked. “Not that you don’t have clean nails or anything. I’m sure your nails are clean.”
“I meant, I’m not even close to a superstar,” I explained. “At all. If my dance friend Fiona ever heard me called a star she would get a good laugh—I fall out of my turns.”
“Fiona is a boring bimbo,” Morgan said.
I had to laugh. “That’s true.” Morgan, Fiona, and I had been the three best in Level One. Morgan had the best turn-out, Fiona had the best arches, and I had the longest neck. We envied one another’s parts.
“So who cares what Fiona thinks,” Zoe said. “The bimbo.” All four of us were smiling. Poor Fiona.
I shook my head. “I really wanted to go apple picking.”
“Or at least hay-stacking,” Zoe coughed.
Olivia scrunched her face and said, “Yuck.”
“I like apples,” I protested.
“Yeah, apples,” Zoe said, grinning. “An apple a day.”
The bell rang. “Uh-oh,” Zoe said. “I’m dead.”
Morgan grabbed Olivia’s arm and asked, “It’s so pathetic, don’t you think, when all some girls obsess about is
boys, boys, boys?”
Olivia looked up at me for a second but then nodded at Morgan. “I do,” she said. Zoe ran down the hall toward French, and I followed Morgan and Olivia into Spanish.
six
Morgan left Spanish before I got my stuff together and was already in her seat by the time I got back to Ms. Cress’s for math/science. I felt like throwing up. She looked so serious and sad. I passed her a note saying, “I’m sorry. Please, please, please don’t be mad.”
“About what?” she wrote back. Then she passed a note to Olivia, and I saw Olivia turn around and nod at Morgan before she glanced back at me.
After math/science, Morgan was out of her seat and the room before the bell finished ringing.
“Wait up,” I called to her, grabbing my stuff. “Hey!” It’s not like she could avoid me. We have every period except eighth together. “Morgan!”
She turned around. So did everybody in the hall. I had been yelling. “What?” she whispered, looking around.
I opened my mouth but nothing came out. My right knee wouldn’t stop wobbling, so I had to rest that foot on top of the other. “It’s-it’s-it’s not what you think,” I started to explain.
“What isn’t?” Morgan took a drink from the water fountain. Tommy passed by going to his locker but didn’t look at me.
“The friendship rings,” I whispered. I hadn’t come up with a plan. All I could think was, Please, words, please come out in some order that will make her stop looking so angry.
“I don’t care,” she said, staring me right in the eyes. That’s just how she talks to her dad the few times he calls. Yeah, uh-huh, I don’t care, ’bye.
“Morgan.”
“Olivia’s waiting for me.” She turned around and went to the lockers. It was pretty obvious she didn’t want me to go, too, and my locker is right down the row from hers, so I didn’t know what to do. I leaned against the wall and tried not to cry.
Everything had been going so well: I’m in Level Three, I have an amazing best friend wearing a friendship ring with me, and an adorable, sarcastic boyfriend. Nobody could wish for a better start to seventh grade, except maybe please, please, please don’t let it all crash into bits like it’s doing now.
My eyes were closed as I pressed into fifth position trying to concentrate on just that, just turn-out, when Zoe tapped me on the forehead. I opened my eyes.
“Hey,” she said, smiling at me.
I buried my face in my hands.
“Come on,” she said and dragged me to the bathroom.
“What am I going to do?” I sank down along the wall onto the cold bathroom floor. “Morgan hates me. She’s so hurt and it’s my fault, with all she’s going through at home, I should never, I-I feel so terrible.”
Zoe twisted the friendship ring on her finger so the knot part was hidden in her palm and asked, “What did she say?”
“Nothing. ‘I don’t care.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ You know.” I bent over my legs and buried my face in my calves. “Argh.”
“Did she say something or did you?” Zoe asked.
“I did.” I looked up at her. “I just, I felt like, I mean it was obvious that she, so . . . What? Was that really stupid of me? I mean, what, I should just, what? Ignore it?”
“I don’t know.” Zoe sat down next to me.
“My mother said don’t say anything, just, you know. Don’t make a big, but, I-I-I how can I just, I mean . . .”
“Maybe you don’t need to keep apologizing to her, though.”
I shrugged. “But . . .”
“It just might, you know, make her feel worse. Maybe.”
“Maybe,” I said, closing my eyes.
Zoe pulled at her shoelace, unraveling it. “I don’t know.”
“No,” I agreed. “You’re probably right.”
“I don’t know,” Zoe said again. “I just know, the longer I can avoid a conflict, the better.”
“Yeah,” I said, wiping my nose with my palm. “Me, too.”
We sat there for a second, not talking. An eighth-grade girl came in and almost tripped on us, going to the stall. We both pulled our legs in close to our bodies and smiled at each other. “I feel like we live here,” Zoe whispered. Last week she was crying in the bathroom; now it was me. She picked at a callus on her hand while the eighth grader flushed, came out, and left without washing her hands. We made faces at each other like, gross! Then we laughed.
“You OK?” Zoe asked.
I nodded and put my chin down on my knees. The bathroom floor was so hard and cold and probably full of gross germs. “Much better,” I said. “Thanks.”
She half-shrugged, one shoulder only. So what if she’s a little big in the rear? She has a very pretty face, very photogenic. Morgan was saying last week that Zoe has such nice blue eyes, it’s too bad she’s a little big in the rear. Maybe boys think that—Morgan said boys like really little butts—but I think they should notice Zoe’s eyes and her sense of humor. I worried, actually, last week that maybe Zoe and Tommy liked each other. There were strange silences between them. But I guess not, because she got him to ask me out.
“Tommy barely said hello to me,” I whispered.
Zoe went over to the sink and turned on the water. “He wouldn’t have asked you out if he didn’t like you.”
“I guess. Hey!” I stood up, excited. “Maybe Morgan will feel better if you get Jonas to ask her out. What do you think? Because she’s been saying wouldn’t it be fun, the four of us could—”
“Fun,” Zoe said, pressing up on the soap dispenser so many times the pink ooze overflowed her palm.
“I am such a jerk.” I turned around and banged my head against the wall. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I should just shut up like my mother says to.”
“No,” Zoe said, scrubbing. “It’s just like, wa-hoo, that would be really fun for me, you four.”
“What about if we fix you up with somebody, too?”
“Yeah,” she said, rinsing. “Like who?”
I thought for a sec. “Lou.”
“Lou?” she asked. “Lou Hochstetter?”
“What’s wrong with Lou? He’s in my homeroom.”
“Lou.” She kept rinsing her hands. No wonder her fingernails are so clean. “Lou?”
I started to laugh, how she was saying that. “What?”
“Mr. World War Two.”
“He’s tall.”
“Maybe you should shut up, actually,” Zoe suggested.
I handed her a paper towel. “Think about it?”
“Shut up.” She pointed at me, but she was smiling.
“Fine.”
“No, actually, that’ll be great, since you can’t come apple picking,” she said, rubbing each finger dry with the paper towel. “Yeah. Me and Lou, we’ll be hay-stacking next week while you pirouette, or whatever. Great.”
I slumped back down. “You’re gonna have so much fun.”
“I am NOT hay-stacking Lou Hochstetter. Hello! Joke!”
“No,” I said. “I don’t even, no, I just, you’re all gonna be, even if nobody hay-stacks at all, it’s like, OK, I can’t play soccer, but now . . . Everybody will be, unifying, while I sit outside the principal’s office, waiting to be picked up for dance. No way. Forget it. I quit.”
“Quit what?”
“Ballet,” I said. “Last year I was happy to be a bug, this year I want to be normal.”
“A bug?” Zoe asked. “What?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. Just, I’m quitting ballet.”
She crumpled the paper towel and leaned against the wall. “Maybe you could just get out of Monday. You don’t have to be so drastic.”
“No, she’ll never let me,” I tried to explain. “And anyway it’s not just Monday. It’s like, what I really want, I mean, I explained it to you. R
emember?” It’s what I had confided to her, at our sleepover.
Zoe nodded. “You want to hang around at the pizza place.”
“You make it sound idiotic,” I complained. “It’s not about pizza, it’s just, like . . .” I grabbed my foot and stretched it over my head. Stretching helps me think.
“Youch,” she said. She grabbed her foot and tried to pull it up, but it only got about up to her waist before she lost her balance.
I smiled and put my foot down. “It’s not just apple picking either. It’s the whole, I want to slouch. I want to watch TV all day on Saturday.”
“There’s nothing on.”
“I want to be on the soccer team.”
“That would be fun,” Zoe admitted.
“Wouldn’t it? I mean, I like performing but, I don’t know.” I pictured crossing the stage in a series of leaps, my legs long and straight, graceful as a swan. I shook my head. “I like it OK, but maybe not as much as like, being part of everybody. Going out for pizza after games.”
“Bunch of lunatics smooshed in a booth, rehashing the game, grabbing slices”—Zoe nodded—“that’s the best.”
“It is. And she’s the one—my mom, she’s like—‘You have to do what’s right for you.’”
Zoe pitched the paper towel into the wastebasket. “Well, that’s true.”
“Yes. Definitely. So too bad on my mother. When she wanted something different, she just, she was buying apple butter, but she didn’t, she j-j-j-j . . .”
“What?”
I took a deep breath. I rarely stutter, anymore—only when I get really nervous or upset, or if I have to say my name in front of people. That’s still hard. In first grade I got stuck on the S sound every morning; it was dreadful. Some kids teased me about it, called me C-C-C instead of CJ. The only ones who didn’t were Morgan, Zoe, and Olivia—which I’ll never forget.
I looked up at Zoe. She was watching me, playing with her friendship ring. She smiled, then. She really uses her whole face, doing it. I don’t know anybody else who smiles so big like that. “You really want to do soccer?” she asked.